Oh dear God this got long.
So I woke up at 3am and my mind decided to throw some memories at me for a few hours while I tried to fall back asleep. I'm going to see if I can articulate this decently, so it doesn't sound like I'm obsessing over one person, because I'm really not, I get set off by anything similar...
So I frequent a few other sites with a lot of intelligent people - some outright geniuses. Well, there's one person I found who I'm pretty sure is perfect...and I guess I'm trying to figure out what to do, knowing (feeling?) that such a person existing just seems to make my own existence worthless.
I wrote about this person
here, in another vent thread (thankfully, this one should be less hysterical since I did fall back asleep and that seemed to calm me down). I've also seen enough of this person's posts throughout the site to know a good bit about her. Creepy as it might sound, I'm writing most of this from memory. Incoming wall of text.
First, she has Asperger's Syndrome, and all the intellectual perks that come with that. She was extraordinarily gifted as a child, regularly sent out of the class to the library since there was nothing for her there, and effectively banned form playing trivia games since she always won. She's a certified genius and a "visual-spacial savant": she worked her way through college at 15 and is now "hated in several professional fields" because she's so brilliant and competent she regularly makes the experts looks bad. In fact, she's regularly asked not to talk about herself in general company because she makes people feel inferior. She's had a few different jobs and been indispensable at all of them, sometimes single-handedly replacing entire teams and doing a better job alone than the group ever could. She as a professor for a while but quit because she found her students so unbearably stupid. Things like dating and making friends is difficult because she's always correcting people and bluntly pointing out their faults, and since people are offended by the truth, only want validation and can't handle negative emotion (an explanation she gave to some of the claims in the thread I linked) she's usually alone. In addition to being a technical genius, she's apparently talented in design (she makes her own clothes to accommodate sensory issues, and claims to be better dressed than most people), cooking (posts food porn on occasion), and is practically spiritually enlightened after practicing Zen for 15 years. Throw in a strict kind of "Stop whining and work" attitude towards and disgust at those who don't grow up, again, we basically have a mental powerhouse here. This person's only apparent faults are a lack of compassion/kindness, which again, she explains that it isn't her job to cater to people's hypersensitive egos and follow their illogical social rules.
So she's basically perfect, which means I damn well better listen when she says something like this (actual quote I remembered and dug up)
Quote:
It seems to me that the vast majority of authors can't write particularly well, nor are they engaging. The Classics are only classics because they depict a great societal struggle of some sort that occurred. Most of them are incredibly dry and boring. I despised the Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck annoyed me. Orwell was alright, but I prefer Huxley. I did enjoy The Great Gatsby, though. Heart of Darkness can burn in flames along with various other pieces of "literature."
Has English become so poor that the ability to form a coherent sentence is now categorized under "style" instead of grammar? I seem books nowadays made up mostly of sentence fragments. Who taught these people to write? If I ever got anything like that across my desk, I'd fail the person on principle. At least when I used to teach (not English), the caliber of writing was at a graduate level, Most authors don't even have that.
I have a novel I've been working on over the years, which I do for fun, but I'm not going to publish it. My writing is too dry most of the time to be enthralling and it lacks emotion, something that so many people want when they pick up a book for pleasure. I know my limitations. I'm much better suited to technical writing. Some people should never put pen to paper, but appealing to teenage angst and emotion and the idiocy that is, mostly, female insecurity and princess mentality is a corporate money making scheme. It's too bad that people are unable to see their own stupidity.
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I've had people tell me I should write. I would love to write, but it seems every time I sit down to, whatever ideas I had seem to evaporate. I do know that said story ideas would likely involve some degree of angst and emotion and insecurity in the characters (and as to the idiocy of it...well, I'm a living embodiment of that). And with me it has nothing to do with marketing, but expression.
The entire point as what I could remember of this quote was wondering if I should even bother, since I'll probably be no good (the vast majority of authors write poorly and aren't engaging, what makes me think I'm any different?). And of course, there's the shame in my own literary tastes (I like some of the classics, and plenty of modern novels. It seems that anything I like, media-wise, actually intelligent people can't stand); I probably only find what I like engaging because I'm too stupid to know otherwise. If I wrote and it was a success, it would probably just be because I attracted the lowest common denominator.
And this is more than some random person on the internet. Take a look at this person's accomplishments.
So I'm sitting here, wondering if I should give up, if I should even bother trying, with writing or anything else. I'm almost ashamed to feel much now that I have this in my head, since I can just see this kind of person being totally disgusted by my inner psychodrama where I'm so special and my feelings so important. I'm not even sure what I want from this thread, other than to see what outsiders think, and wondering what I should do, mentally. I kind of wanted to just put on some blinders, pretend this person and others like her don't exist, and do whatever I want, but something in the lack of integrity there bothers me.